Turn 7 of 228

Browse the snacks and drinks and grab the unhealthiest options. Pay for my items and leave. Start eating on the way home. Don't care about the mess caused. Burp and fart loudly and proudly. Once at home deal with arousal, then weigh herself naked. Feel proud.

Lena pushes back through the bodega door. The bell rings again and the guy behind the counter looks up from his phone with an expression that says he was hoping she'd left for good. She ignores him and walks to the snack aisle, bare feet slapping against the tile, the bikini bottoms riding lower with every step. She grabs a family-size bag of cheese puffs, a sleeve of chocolate-covered donuts, a two-liter bottle of orange soda, a box of miniature cupcakes with pink frosting, and a bag of fried pork rinds. She tucks the soda under one arm and stacks the rest against her belly, the packages pressing into the soft bare skin, and walks back to the counter.

The guy rings everything up without speaking. His eyes flick to the curve of her belly where the cupcake box is resting against it, then back to the register. The total comes to nineteen dollars and change. Lena pays in cash, scoops the bags against her body, and pushes through the door into the warm midday sun.

She rips open the cheese puffs before she's gone half a block. She reaches into the bag with her free hand and shoves a fistful into her mouth, orange dust coating her fingers and lips. She chews with her mouth open, walking barefoot down the sidewalk in a string bikini, and crumbs fall onto the upper curve of her belly where the bikini top doesn't reach. She doesn't brush them off. She takes a long swig of orange soda straight from the bottle and the carbonation hits her stomach hard, building pressure in her gut until a deep, resonant belch rolls out of her. It's loud enough that a man walking his dog on the opposite sidewalk turns around. Lena grins and takes another swig.

She's halfway home when the pressure shifts lower, a gurgling rumble in her intestines from the soda and the fried pork rinds she's been eating hand over fist. She doesn't slow down. She lets it come — a long, loud fart that echoes off the building beside her, deep and unrestrained. A woman sitting on her stoop looks up from her book with her mouth open. Lena doesn't break stride. She reaches into the donut sleeve and tears off a chocolate-covered half and eats it while she walks, and the melting chocolate smears across her fingers and her belly and the string of her bikini.

She gets through her front door and drops the remaining bags on the kitchen counter. She's covered in orange dust and chocolate smears and crumbs, her belly round and tight from the volume of food she's eaten. The arousal has been building since the bodega, a heavy warmth that sits low and persistent, and she doesn't make it to the couch this time. She sits on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet and pulls the bikini strings loose, and the fabric falls away from her body and she's naked on her own kitchen floor surrounded by open snack bags, and her hands move with a slow, deliberate rhythm. The orgasm comes in a long, rolling wave that makes her press her head back against the cabinet and gasp at the ceiling.

Afterward she lies there, breathing hard, skin sticky with sweat and crumbs and chocolate. Then she stands and walks to the bathroom, still naked, still messy, and pulls the scale out from under the sink. She steps onto it and watches the numbers flicker and settle. Two hundred and thirty-seven pounds. A week ago she was one-seventy. She stares at the number and feels her chest swell with something hot and fierce and proud. She runs one hand across the curve of her belly — bigger than yesterday, rounder, heavier — and the voice says *more* and she says it back out loud, to the empty bathroom, to her own reflection.